Forget backwards, time to go forwards a bit

So those backdated journal entries I meant to and still want to do? Not happening.

I've been reading. Devoured almost all of Stephanie Laurens' Cynster *and* Bastion Club series on the Costa Rica trip, in addition to His Dark Materials trilogy, and then, just because it was there, the Liaden series by Lee&Miller (who I've since found on LJ, so yay, more authors to stalk). Yesterday I even found their latest 'posted on the web' Fledgeling, but I'm done with that.

I read ebooks on a Palm m515 (one I scavenged off our pile at work when my newer one died) running Mobipocket. The romance novels are DRMed, which makes me cranky when I swap Palms, as I have to redownload stuff, and further cranky when I contemplate the Kindle, but the Baen books (and now Meisha Merlin, which means all the Liaden stuff) is DRM-free (yay Baen!) so that's no nevermind. The battery gets drained fast with the backlight on, but it's worth it: the bus and bus stops always have uncertain light, so my eyes get saved.

I knit a few rows on the lace scarf this morning, but I've got Wen Spencer's Tinker and whatever the sequel is queued up on the Palm for this evening. My hands want to get back on the knitting bandwagon, but my brain hasn't caught up with that yet.

The current project on the board is one I started at Mom&Dad's just before Christmas. I was compiling a bunch of vacation photos onto DVD (and failing to burn one from the Mac that could be read on a PC) and started messing with iDVD. Now Dru wants me to put together a slideshow, and I'd started it, but now that I'm not working on Mom's iMac (shiny new 24" iMac!) all my file links are broken. Bleah. I'm not looking forward to rebuilding those, but I'm learning iPhoto and iDVD and a few other bits of the iLife suite finally.

WoWishly, I've gotten my hunter to 70 finally, and my shaman to 60- the changes in patch 2.3 to the under-60 leveling is simply ridiculous. Fun, but ridiculous.

eBooks and their readers

So, my brother called me yesterday and told me about the Kindle. I informed him he was a few weeks late. :)

I've been reading ebooks on my work Palm for 4ish years. That's a vague guesstimate, by the way, it's definitely longer than 2 years, since my 2 year membership to Fictionwise has long since expired. And I'm pretty sure I got caught up in it not too long after Eric Flint was starting up the Baen Free Library. Which... nevermind, I'll go check. Hmm. Make that 5 or 6 years.

In this time of reading, I've made definite decisions as to my wishlist of features I need before I'm gonna shell out the bucks for an ebook reader. I know I talked about backlight in my previous post, and that's what I'd need in a traditional display, but I haven't had a chance to see the new e-ink/e-paper technology, which by its nature precludes backlight, but has got to be easier to eyeball than a palm screen in full sunlight or shaky streetlight, both of which are sheer hell to make out. All the new ebook readers (except the EBookwise) are going with the tech, so one would think it's a moot point.

But most of my purchased books are Baen (which come multiformat, thank god) or DRM-Mobipocket, which leaves the EBookwise out. Likewise, the Sony model is out, as Sony still hasn't wised up to the point it should have taken when it lost the Betamax/VHS wars: Proprietary Standards means you exclude customers, rather than including them. More customers=good, remember? They come up with good ideas and then shoot themselves in the foot.

Now, the Kindle's shiny and all, and I can read all my Baen books on it, but not my DRM-Mobipockets. (And I've given myself a moratorium on DRM-ed books. Fuck that with a flaming pogo stick. If the music companies can come around (ok, mostly because they want to mess with Apple and the iTunes pricing) on the subject of DRM, so can the publishing companies. (Can I say again, I love Baen. Really. With all my heart. And a cherry on top.)

The Bookeen (and potentially the HanLin eBook) can handle Mobi-DRM, but then I start thinking of the fanfic. I've tried converting html to ebook with iSilo, since my Palm can't really handle it, but its tedious, and stories in parts? Sheer hell.

This is when I start veering away from dedicated ebook readers. Because really, for that price, I don't need another electronic brick in my bag. I've already got a phone and an iPod and a Palm. I've played with a Blackberry for work, which merges the Palm and the phone, but its screen isn't great for reading. Believe me, I've tried. Doable, but iffy.

For $399, I'd rather buy the iPhone. I'm not, because it's still first run, and I want them to shake more bugs out, but I wouldn't have to switch carriers, and I could jettison so much of my electronics collection. I'm still forked on the Mobi-DRM, but the rest of it makes up for it. To make it worth my while to carry around a dedicated ebook-reader, the price point needs to be so much lower.